If you’re an iPhoto user then you’re likely stifled by the limitations on photo editing? There are a few point and click options to enhance, remove red eye, and crop, but iPhoto is more of a storage place for photos than it is a photo editor.

You can spend big money on photo editing apps or you can spend nothing on a Mac app that gives you a couple of hundred mix and match options to enhance your photos beyond your imagination. Yet another Friday Freebie from the ever alert reviewers at Mac360.

200 Image Tricks In Image Tricks

It takes talent, experience, a few Dummies and Idiots books, and night school classes to even begin using Photoshop to improve your photos.

Image Tricks Lite is the Mac freeware app to edit photos and images using many of the functions built-in to your Mac.

Going beyond iPhoto, here’s what you can do with Image Tricks. Better controls for saturation, brightness, contrast and color matrix.

Images can be blurred, distorted, bumped, pinched and twirled. Or stylize photos with options for the mosaic look, a bunch of halftone effects, or blending and overlapping until the cows come home.

This kind of functionality is easy. Drop in a photo and click on an effect or filter.

All these different filters, effects, generators and options can be dropped on top of each other– mixed and matched– to create stuffing effects.

The controls are all point and click or slider based so they’re easy implement. The only difficulty you’ll have is to keep from going overboard.

Image Tricks comes with 82 Core Image effects and filters, 13 image generators, a dozen photo frames and an equal number of vector borders. There are also over 70 unique masks you can apply to a photo.

It handles 20 image formats (all the basics from TIFF, JPEG to GIF, PDF, and EPS) and even makes it easy to pull photos from iPhoto.

That’s the Lite version and it’s free. Not free is Image Tricks Pro which will set you back a lunch and a couple of trips to Starbucks in exchange for 300 additional effects, filters, generators, frames, borders and masks.

GIMP notwithstanding, Image Tricks is the de facto photo editing bargain for Mac users. All that’s missing is a price tag and the 300 or so options in the Pro version.

5G? Meh!

About Ron McElfresh

My first Mac was the 128k model (from 1984, so I'm old). I live and work in Honolulu, Hawaii. Read more of my articles here. Read more Mac stuff on McSolo, or a little thoughtful nonsense on McElfresh.org.